All There Is

If this is all there is, I am not sure I want to go on.
The “all” of it is endlessly complicated and messy while stuck in it and only simple and clear from a distance. Like an Instagram filter that tricks you into believing.
And I know it’s not true, that I’m the loneliest one in the world, but if I had known I would have to walk this path alone forever, I may have chosen differently. I still might.
Because what do I really need all this space and room and time for? When all I have to show for my last weekend is another story I started in my head that I will never finish, because it’s the same one I start over and over with an ever changing cast solving ever the same problem, the one at the core of me.

In a room full of people, I sit in the corner now or clear away empty glasses. And when someone asks me how I do it, how I find a balance, how I find my energy, I smile and I lie and I don’t say that I have long ago figured out that if I try or if I don’t doesn’t matter. It always ends the same. With me here. And only me.

There’s too much stuff and too much baggage and time only ever moves forward, so I keep putting one foot in front of the other, but my heart’s not in it and I can’t remember the last time it was. Like that last time you saw someone before you knew it would be the last time – it has slipped away into the fog of memory. The one that sometimes extends a long finger and robs you of something else, something small, something it thinks you won’t notice or miss – until you do.
I can’t remember the smell of my mom’s perfume when I was a child. The fog has taken that too.

The things I won’t let it take, the moments I cling to as if my life depends on it, have long stopped serving me well, because they are from so long ago that the real memory and the story I have told myself don’t match anymore. They are just a construct now, of what I wish happened, of what I think I should have felt, of what I hope I will feel one day, again.

When life was ever-changing, people ever-moving, it wasn’t so obvious that this is all there is. At least I don’t think there was ever more of it, I just thought there was. Or I didn’t think about it all. But once the thought hits your mind, it’s impossible to breathe it away and I won’t let my mediation teacher tell me otherwise.

I try on other languages for size, because maybe I have just been using the wrong words and that’s why no one hears me, or really gets my meaning. If so many others have figured it out, then what am I missing? They can’t all be pretending, the odds clearly point the other way. That’s why I scan every room and every face for another pair of eyes that look at light just to see the shadow.  

And if I found you, I would take your hand and tell you all the words you have always needed to hear. And I would know what they are, because they are the words I have waited all my life to hear. And I would mean them, like I know you would. And you would be loved and you would be whole and you would be seen. And for one more moment, that would be all there is. And for that moment, that would be enough.